For Every Right Way, There’s a Wrong Way

Recently, in order to prepare for a houseguest, I had to make the bed in the guest room. As I did so, I remembered that, of course, since the bed has a length longer than the width, so do the sheets. Makes sense. But after I got the sheet on the bed, I saw that I still managed to do it wrong, because there’s a particular end of the sheet meant for the head of the bed and one for the foot of the bed. The end that goes at the head of the bed has an extra sewn hem. As I redid my work, it occurred to me that the extra effort the sheet maker put in to show me the right way to put the sheet on the bed was probably meant to be helpful, but it was actually the opposite. Since there’s no reason why that end of the sheet had to be at the top of the bed, they had created a wrong way to put the sheet on. If they’d made both ends the same, both ends would be correct. They’d actually made making the bed more difficult, not less.

This is a clear lesson that game designers need to learn. Every time you make a right way to do something in your game, you’re also making a wrong way to do it—which is sometimes fine, but you have to be careful.

Back when we designed 3rd Edition D&D, we systematized monster and NPC creation. The way you calculated a monster’s Armor Class was the same way that you calculated one for a player character. This was significant because in earlier versions of the game, a designer could assign whatever AC seemed appropriate for the monster. Likewise with Hit Dice (HD), and so on. There was also a specific number of skills a creature of a given HD should have and a precise method to determine its skill bonuses.

This latter concept was a mistake. High HD creatures with high Intelligence have a lot of skills, and there were many fiddly ways you had to remember to figure into its bonuses. The mistake was twofold. It made monsters and high-level NPCs a real chore to create if one cared about doing them “right.” And what was it all for? Was it important to know what a Lich’s bonus was to decipher scripts? Was anyone’s game enhanced by knowing that a satyr’s Knowledge (nature) bonus was +9 rather than +10?

I would argue not.

That’s a good example of creating a right way, but all it accomplished was creating a wrong way. Could someone on the Internet go through and check the math on the monster skills? Yes (and they did). And when the salamander was “wrong” because its blacksmithing bonus was too low or too high, what did that matter? It didn’t. Having a right way really only created a disincentive for DMs to create their own monsters. Sure, in 2nd Edition the rules didn’t tell you how to figure a basilisk’s or an owlbear’s stats on your own—and this bothered people who wanted everything systematized—yet monsters were easy and fast to make and customize. You just eyeballed it.

Now, one could make the argument that the solution is to just make the system for creating monsters easy. Even assuming that’s true considering 3rd Edition’s paradigms (and it probably wasn’t), what’s the point? At the table, only the GM sees NPC stats, and if the goblin should have had 6 hit points and the GM gave it 5, is there any real consequence to the story, or more importantly, to the fun?

Consequence is probably the takeaway concept here. If a designer makes a system, a method, or a rule, it should have consequence. This isn’t board game design—the key rule underpinning an RPG could be phrased as, “The players decide what to do and the GM determines if they succeed.” In other words, the imaginations of the people around the table power the game. Rules are only there to help establish a shared imaginary space or rather, a shared imaginary experience. Thus, the point here isn’t that rules don’t matter, it’s that if a rule isn’t of consequence to the end goal (a fun shared experience), then it’s just clutter.

I might get roasted for saying this, but it’s a little like grammar. Writing and speaking are about communication. While grammar facilitates that goal, sometimes the right way to phrase something gets in the way of, or even prohibits, clear communication. That’s why writers and speakers break those rules all the time. Hopefully, they have the knowledge of the rules to break them on purpose and the talent to know when breaking the rule actually helps communication. But most rules that exist only to point out some common, perfectly understandable phrase is technically incorrect are not just useless, they’re counterproductive to the goal of communicating.

Think of rules like currency. You only have so much to spend, so don’t spend it needlessly. Each rule has to carry enough weight to justify its existence. Best of all, sometimes the lack of a rule will actually empower someone to use their imagination and facilitate the fun.

If you’re interested in rules design, you very likely will be interested in this latest project we’re funding. Called Cypher Decoded, it’s full of rules alternatives and options for Cypher. It’s a short, fun, pop-up sort of campaign to celebrate the release of new Cypher edition.